General Leopard Gecko Care: Housing

Leopard geckos are among the easiest of reptiles to keep and breed suc-cessfully. It certainly doesn’t take a rocket scientist to be successful over mul-tiple generations with these amazing animals. With a few proper husbandry techniques and little leo education, anyone can do it.

Enclosure Type: No matter what your aim is, whether you just want to keep a few pets or you want to have a full-fledged breeding colony, the best advice is to keep it simple. Few things work better than a glass aquaria.

These are great for several reasons. They are inexpensive, easy to clean, easy to move, and allow you to view your animals exhibiting their full range of behaviors. You’ll want to get a top, not so much to keep the geckos in, but mainly to keep unwanted pests (like your cat or your wife’s little sis-ter) out. Also, if you choose to heat the enclosure with a heat lamp, you’ll need something to set it on. To the left is an example of a typical leopard

gecko setup. This particular tank is a 55 gallon long. I found it on the side of the road with the stand. The former owner wanted to throw it out because it leaked. Realizing that leopard geckos don’t live underwater, I took advantage of the op-portunity. Deals like this are fantastic, so keep your eyes pealed. This particular terrarium currently holds six adult leopard geckos (1 male and 5 females). Never keep more than one adult male in the same enclosure. They will fight, sometimes to the death. In a tank this size, you may be able to keep more than one male, but if you’re dealing with high dollar animals, the benefits of sav-ing a little space certainly don’t outweigh the costs. In the following section, I am going to use the tank you’ve just seen above to illustrate what a good leopard gecko enclosure should look like.

Heating Leopard geckos come from the desert, and therefore they need heat. This is the first thing we’ll discuss. If you are going to successfully keep a leopard gecko then you must provide an adequate heating source. I use two sources in this particular setup. The fist is a heat lamp equipped with a special heat-emitting bulb. De-pending on the size of

your terrarium and other factors (how cold it is in your house) you may need a high wattage bulb or maybe a low wattage bulb. I’ve never used more than a 60 watt heat bulb and never had problems. The second heat source I have for this setup is an under tank heater (UTH). The repti-therm UTH by Zoo-Med is by far the best and most popular. You can get them at your local pet store or order them online from anyone who sells reptile equipment. They come in various sizes that correspond with whatever tank size you use. The larg-est size (50-60 gallon) is what I use for this big tank. I have its position outlined in orange in the above picture. You want to keep your heat source(s) on one side of the tank or the other. This allows for what’s called a heat gradient. Basically, reptiles need to thermoregulate (which is a big word for “control their own body tempera-ture”). Have a temperature gradient in the enclosure that begins at around 90° F on one side and then works its way down to around 75° F on the other side allows the animals to choose their body temperature by moving around the cage.

Regardless of how you choose to heat your enclosure, the main thing is keep the temperature between 77-90° F. In my neck of the woods, I often turn all my lamps off during the summer and only keep the under-tank heaters on. This is plenty to keep the tank warm enough during most of the summer months.

Here is a picture of all my geckos huddling around one area. This particular spot is right over the under-tank heater. I took this pic-ture at night after turn-ing on the lights. They’ve all come out of hiding for the evening but will often congre-gate around the warm-est area of the tank.

Hides Another important element to any leopard gecko setup is hiding places for your animals. Leopard geckos are nocturnal and stay inactive for most of the daylight hours. They need plenty of space to hide and the best method is, again, to keep it simple.

There are two types of hides that are both essential to the wellbeing of your animal. One type is a dry hide and the other is a moist hide. A dry hide can be anything from a cleverly arranged pile of flat rocks to an old butter tub with a hole cut in it. This hide is, essentially, anything dark the leopard gecko can crawl up in and take a siesta. The point of the dry hide is that it’s…well, dry. You can buy all kinds of fancy plastic things from a pet store that are made to look like rocks or logs, or you can make your own things: use your imagination and have some fun.

In this picture, I have both types of hides in use. The one to the right is a magnetic rock made by Exo-Terra. These are pretty ex-pensive (I got mine at Petco for $8.00 on clearance but they usually run around $30.00) but they work nice because you can take the outer shell off and see what’s going on inside the hide. To the left is a moist hide that was specially cre-ated by yours truly out of a $0.25 sandwich tub from a convenient

store. Moist hides, like this one, are essential to the health of your pet and you should have at least one in each enclosure. You can keep them moist in several ways. I use peat moss (which can be bought at Lowe’s or Wal-Mart in the garden section) and keep it moist with a few squirts of water ever few days. Some peo-ple use sand or other types of materials, but Peat Moss works fine and is fairly inexpensive. Geckos need a hide with high humidity to help shed dead skin (which they do every few weeks). If you have problems with your geckos keeping a bit of dead skin around the snout and toes, you might need to put a moist hide in their habitat or maybe raise the humidity in the one you already have by adding a bit more

water than usual. Moist hides also double for egg-laying boxes which are dis-cussed in the section on breeding. A couple more pictures of some moist hides are shown in these pictures. The best method for producing moist hides is to just simply make one out of some cheap plastic containers that you probably have collecting dust in your house anyway.

If you are housing more than one animal in your enclosure then you might want to consider having multiple hides. I have three moist hides and one dry hide in my large tank. I usually don’t keep quite that many but all my females are gravid (pregnant) right now, and I am an advo-cate for having multiple egg laying sites available.

Defecatoria Leopard geckos are, surprisingly, pretty clean animals. No matter how many you have in a group, they will usually form what is called a defecatoria. Ba-

sically, they will all “do their business” (poop) in the same spot. It’s worth-while to invest in some type of poop scooping de-vice that will filter out the poop from the sand. They only cost a few dollars and certainly make it easier to clean a large tank consist-ing of several adult geckos. In this picture you can clearly see the giant pile of gecko waste that desper-ately needs to be cleaned up. Once you have decided on what size enclosure best

fits your needs, chosen a reliable heat source, and created some dry and moist hides, you pretty much have everything you need for your enclosure. Those are all of the essentials. You can add other things like rocks and limbs and branches for the animals to climb on if you like. The only other things that are really nec-essary to a good setup are methods for delivering food and water. These are covered under the section on feeding leopard geckos.